The Atlanta Constitution from Atlanta, Georgia • 117

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution SECTION SATURDAY, MAY 20. 1989 Couple to Many for Better or Worse J2 Crash Won't Keep Chaplain From Car J4 ilUill Runners Say Trails Great for Training Jll Kids Get a Kick Out of Taekwondo mm a mm 1141 11 J8 Ruling on Man Fired Over Harassment Charge Due Monday By Mark Sherman StqffWriter A fired Gwinnett County employee who allegedly fondled two women employees, including the wife of a man he supervised, will have his professional fate determined on Monday. After a 7-hour hearing that ended late Thursday, Gwinnett's Merit Board put off a ruling in the case of Randall E. Parker, 60, a water meter repair supervisor who was fired March 6 for allegedly sexually harassing the two women. Mr.

Parker has denied the alle gations and is appealing his dismissal to the Merit Board. One woman, Elizabeth Kalish, testified on Thursday that she was sexually harassed by Mr. Parker for nearly three years, but only decided to report the incidents in February after their frequency increased. She said Mr. Parker touched her breasts and buttocks, and hugged and kissed her in front of her husband, Joseph.

He worked for Mr. Parker for nearly three years. The other woman, Tracie Key Bush, came forward only after learning of Mrs. Kalish's allega ties employee1. "He's like a father figure or grandfather figure to me." The Merit Board is expected to make public its decision on Monday.

The decision can be appealed to the Gwinnett Superior Court The allegations against Mr. Parker mark the fifth sexual harassment case against a Gwinnett County employee in the last three years, said Richard Veit, county employee relations manager. Mr. Parker is the second of those employees to be fired, Mr. Veit said.

The Kalishes told the Merit Board they didn't report the inci- tained with Mr. Parker and his wife. "He taught me a lot of things," Mr. Kalish said of his former boss. "I respected him." The couples even dined together during overlapping vacations in Florida.

Mrs. Bush testified that she told Mr. Parker she was not offended when he touched her or rubbed her legs but she told the Merit Board that her true feelings were quite different "I was scared," she said. "I lost one job that way." tions. Mrs.

Bush was unable to give the dates of the alleged incidents under cross-examination from Mr. Parker's attorney, Kathryn M. Zick-ert Many of the 28 witnesses who testified for and against Mr. Parker described him as an outgoing man who often innocently hugged women and was embraced by them in return. "Why is Mr.

Parker so hugga-ble?" Ms. Zickert asked at one point "Because he's a nice fella," replied Donna Martin, a public utili dents earlier because they feared for their jobs. "But after he touched her on the behind," Mr. Kalish said in a voice filled with emotion, "she came to me one night and was so upset Mr. Kalish wept openly, and was escorted from the room.

Shortly after the alleged incident in early February, the couple made a formal complaint Mr. Kalish later testified. Several witnesses, including Mr. Parker and the Kalishes, described the friendship the Kalishes main Jenkins Asks County To Help Pay Expenses Of Running 2 Parks Claims City Residents Double-Taxed I By Howard Buskirk SUiffWriler Mayor Bartow Jenkins of Law-renceville has asked county officials to pay part of the cost of running the city's two parks. Mayor Jenkins said that for the past three years city residents have paid the county $700,000 over three years for recreation and gotten nothing in return.

"What we've got now is double taxation," Mayor Jenkins said recently. "I think they ought to either put some recreational facilities in here or reimburse us to let us expand our own recreational facilities." The only parks in Lawrenceville City Park East and City Park West are solely supported by city tax dollars. Yet, city residents have been paying a special countywide 1-mill recreation tax approved by voters in November 1986. In 1989 alone, Lawrenceville residents will pay the county recreation department $250,000, officials say. At the same time, Lawrence-ville's two city-run parks will cost city tax payers another $250,000 to operate.

"We've paid out $700,000 and haven't got one red penny back," Councilman Mahlon Burson said. Students from Northwestern Elementary School in Alpharetta tour the Bowman-Pirkle Homestead at the Lanier Museum of Past Lives On in BILLY DOWNSStaff Natural History in Buford. The Homestead is perhaps best known for its annual Civil War re-enactments. 1818 Homestead Legal 'Dogfight' Breaks Out In the Saga of Shar-Pei Deal Lawrenceville Mayor Bartow Jenkins say city residents have paid $700,000 to the county, with very little to show for it "Something has got to be done. We are very upset It's a pretty hot issue right now and it's getting ready to come to a head." But Mike Huff, director of Human Services for the county and head of Parks and Recreation, said the only way Lawrenceville can get money back is if city officials agree to go along with a county recreation "master plan" calling for the sale of City Park West and creation of a county-run community park at City Park East JENKINS Continued on 17 make sure she had a safe home.

I never dreamed it would end this way." Last month, Ms. Sharpe learned through her attorney that 4-year-old Saki was dead. The saga of Saki began in 1986 when Ms. Sharpe decided to sell the dog because of her heavy work load. She contacted the dog's Acworth breeder, who referred her to Dianne Cox of Lawrenceville.

"Within 30 minutes, she was at my door," Ms. Sharpe said from her Palmetto home, where she has since moved. "She didn't have the $1,800 all at once, so we made a written contract" Saki would go with Mrs. Cox and mate with her Shar-pei. Ms.

Sharpe would get $1,800 from the sale of one of Saki's puppies, or, eventually, one of the puppies. "But it didn't happen that way," Ms. Sharpe said. The puppies never came and she was never paid for Saki. According to Mrs.

Cox, Saki went into heat in 1986 but produced no puppies, Ms. Sharpe said. Finally, in April 1988, Ms. Sharpe sued Mrs. Cox for breach of contract She demanded the $1,800 owed since no puppies had been produced.

SHAR-PEI Continued on J7 built by Native Americans. Some of the furnishings, donated by the family, are original, but some, like the rustic pump organ sort of Gwinnett's first home entertainment center are "what we felt they would have had at the time," and acquired from antique shops or other sources, Ms. Taylor said. The Homestead is perhaps best known for its Civil War re-enactments, staged annually by actors from the Georgia Division Re-enactment Association This year, the event which draws hundreds of people to the Lanier Museum of Natural History park will be June 17-18. The park, adjacent to the Lake Lanier Water Treatment Plant on Buford Dam Road in Buford, was founded in the 1970s as a "water museum," and has seen better, and worse, times.

Early on, the water notion evaporated, and themuseum itself foundered and closed several times in the early 1980s, making the tourist trade for authentica in Buford seem as hardscrabble an industry as farming in the 1800s. But in September 1986, Ms. Taylor reopened it for the county as, among other things, an educational vehicle for Gwinnett's children, and now the Homestead is holding its own. With her assistant, Susan Frazier, who keeps an anthology of descendants and conducts tours of the home, she wants to eventually acquire replicas of the outbuildings that surrounded the house, like a donated corn mill that now sits outside. But children see a simpler thing when they visit the Homestead.

'They all think it's a haunted house," she said. Cabin Near Buford Open to Visitors By Robert Berry SUiffWriler fes, there was life in Gwinnett before Wendy's. While it might appear to the newcomer as if the county sprung full-blown from the brow of a canny real-estate developer circa 1974, Gwinnett has a healthy historical legacy. And pieces of it, persisting largely through the work of dedicated amateur historians, still exist Near Buford, for instance, a century removed from Gwinnett's fast-food emporia and miles away from the roar of traffic, there is the Bowman-Pirkle 1818 Homestead. The log cabin a 4-rm, 0 bath, 2frplc, great view, no-drman historical apparition is part museum, part mythology of the period before the Civil War.

It is open to visitors on Saturdays from 1 to 3 p.m. through November. "The house was built for a man named John Bowman in 1818," said Carla Taylor, who supervises the Homestead for the county. "He was a courier for Andrew Jackson, back before Jackson was president He took leave from the Army to accept a gift from the Cherokee Indians of 2,700 acres," on both sides of the HallGwinnett county line, just before the land lotteries of the 1820s. Mr.

Bowman, a slave owner who went on to become one of the largest plantation owners in Gwinnett, left a parcel that totaled some 8,400 acres. After Mr. Bowman died, Noah Pirkle, his son-in-law, purchased the Homestead in 1890. By Wanda R. Yancey SUiffWriier It is a lawsuit that has all the makings of a major motion picture: love, sex, deception and a regal leading lady who cavorts with a commoner, touching off her fatal fall from grace.

But stop the cameras. This lawsuit is over a dog. A very expensive dog, actually. One of those pricey Shar-pei's from China, the ones with all the wrinkles. Three years ago, a Gwinnett County woman agreed to sell her Shar-pei to a Lawrenceville woman.

The payment would be either $1,800 or a Shar-pei puppy. The original owner claims she never got her money and did not get a puppy until after she filed suit What's worse, when a puppy finally arrived, it had long hair. Shar-peis have short hair. No one knows if Saki, the Shar-pei in question, was so humiliated from giving birth to a mutt that it just killed her. But Saki did die after a nasty fall that injured her spine, and now lawsuits are flying every which way in Gwinnett State Court "This is a mess," said the original owner, Janet Sharpe.

"All I wanted was to sell Saki and to BILLY DOWNSStaff Tour guide Susan Frazier shows the Homestead to children from Northwestern Elementary. At right is her niece, Baily Frazier. Ms. Frazier and Baily are wearing 19th-century dresses. It is the living legacy that persists most vibrantly.

Countless descendants of the BowmanPirkle clan lived on the property until 1966. And in 1977, Golden Pirkle, a great-great grandson of Mr. Bowman, donated the house to the county. Their gift to history meant wresting the two-story cabin from the 1800s into Gwinnett's present in a modern-day way a move on wheels down the highway. Originally about three miles away, on the Hall County line, it was partially disassembled and moved to its present site in 1977.

Additions to the hand-hewn two-story cabin a kitchen, a few extra rooms were stripped away during a restoration project to reveal the original, cabin, which was.